Winner of The 2024 Philosophical Society of Texas Poetry Award
Winner of The 2024 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry

Threaded with epistolary poems to Gravity—envisioned as a capricious god as the author's father began to fall frequently at the outset of a progressive illness—Aronson's latest poems contemplate and address what anchors us, literally and figuratively. The poems in Aronson's third collection excavate grief during the process of losing parents, one to physical illness and the other to dementia. But even in the midst of grief, Aronson never loses sight of the larger world, ever present in all its danger and beauty.

Rebecca Aronson is the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of The 2016 Orison Poetry Prize and The 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from The Albuquerque Museum Foundation, as well as a finalist for The 2017 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award. Her first collection, Creature, Creature, won The Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has received The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, The Loft's Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and The Tennessee Williams Scholarship to The Sewanee Writers' Conference. Aronson is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.

"Rebecca Aronson's incredible new collection is full of verve and a syntax of ecstatic vocabulary. Whether it's through abecedarians or epistles to gravity, Aronson's poems carry the weight of a life, its pressures, its miraculous brevity. Anchor is a balm against grief. These poems face off against loss with 'Technicolor blooming and bird riot,' and every line hums with urgency." - Traci Brimhall

"We know from Newton, who named it, that gravity is the force of attraction drawing bodies together. Etymologically, it shares itself with gravid and grave—beginning and end. In Anchor, Aronson has given us both the metaphor and the ballast: the harbor from which we venture into our lives on Earth, and the commonality of death that returns us to the earth. With a languid, meditative syntax reminiscent of Virginia Woolf—and an eye for detail equally sensuous and lethal—Aronson has achieved an intimate and artful collection about loss and the inevitable cycles of ebb and flow experienced by every life." - Kathy Fagan

"In her splendid third collection of poems, Rebecca Aronson writes of the degeneration and death of her parents. The darknesses of the subjects, however, are magicked into beautiful balance in a stunning juggling act which holds opposite forces spinning and gleaming in the empty air—gravity and flight, body and spirit, absence and presence, love and grief. Aronson devises exquisite metaphors on every page to illustrate the tensions it is our human lot to suffer. Gravity itself is a wonderfully personified character in these pages—it loves the dying father, is jealous of other forces that vie for his body, is a class bully here, an ally of the moon there. The poems here are graceful, wildly gorgeous, enriched by Aronson's vivid animation of earthly and heavenly forces—wind, sand, fire, air, sky, stars. The relative slimness of this volume belies the genuine gravity of the enormous beauties, wonders, and surprises within it." - Sidney Wade